Whether they're called "things", "creatures", "ghouls", or "zombies", the shambling flesheaters of George Romero's Living Dead films are the ultimate consumers. Their sole motivation at all times is to seek out and devour live human prey. As automatons under the Hero System rules, this is essentially the whole of their "programming." What makes the existance of zombies possible is a true mystery. While everything from black magic to divine wrath to a virus to cosmic radiation have been proposed as potential explainations, the force that grants such unnatural life to the dead remains unknown.

A zombie appears much as it did in life, with a few exeptions. Firstly, most zombies are visibly the reanimated dead. While an extraordinarily "fresh" specimen might be mistaken for a short time as a live (albeit oddly-behaving) human, most are visibily decayed and reek horribly. Others feature torn-off limbs, autopsy incisions, and a host of other seemingly fatal wounds that betray their grotesque status to onlookers. A zombie's manual dexterity, coordination, and sense of balance are all next to nil, and its resulting slow, awkward gait is unmistakable to anyone familiar with the creatures.

Intellectually, a zombie is comparable to an insect, being a simple-minded organism driven entirely by basic instinct. Zombies do not feel pain or discomfort of any kind, do not communicate in any way, and display no emotion other than a savage, sub-human lust for flesh and a powerful dread of any open flame. A zombie possesses no concrete memories of its previous existance as a human, but many retain the very dimmest vestiges of their former personalities and will instinctively pantomine old behaviors or frequent favorite places even in undeath. Certain zombies have been known to employ tools on occasion, although this is usually limited to the utilization of hand-held objects as crude bludgeons to batter down barriers between the zombie and its human prey. Whether it is possible for an individual zombie to deviate from this psychological profile at all (in the manner of Bub from Day of the Dead, for example), is entirely up to the individual GM.

In combat, a zombie is a relentless and unsubtle opponent. Slow-moving and clumsy, its sole tactic is to shamble toward and then attempt to grab and devour its prey. More advanced maneuvers are wholly unknown to them, and multiple zombies fight not as a coordinated group, but as individual predators completely indifferent to one another. In fact, except to occasionally squabble over choice bits of a shared carcass in the manner of jackals or vultures, zombies are typically indifferent to one another at all times. Nevertheless, these creatures are still vastly more dangerous in large numbers, where their individual lack of speed and coordination can be compensated for with the ability to simply swarm and overwhelm hapless victims.

A zombie's primary weakness is its brain. Without an intact brain, it cannot function. Permanently deactivating one means either destroying the brain, severing the head from the body (somewhat more risky, as the still-animated head can continue to bite), or annihilating the creature's body completely through explosion, incineration, or other similarly dramatic means. In the bleak world of Living Dead, any human corpse that isn't treated according to these guidelines will reanimate as a zombie in under an hour.

While being eaten alive by a zombie is indeed a terrible fate, those merely wounded by their bite attacks are perhaps even less fortunate. Through still-unknown means, a zombie's bite transmits a terrible sickness to the recipient. Those so wounded are doomed to inevitably sicken and die within a few short days, arising as a zombie immediately thereafter. There is no known cure, but some have speculated that prompt amputation of a bitten appendage may be able to prevent the sickness from taking hold. This is little comfort to those bitten on the torso, neck, or head, of course.

To the overconfident or dimwitted, the mindless, slow-moving zombie may seem like an easy threat to dismiss. Those who know better realize that they're tireless, relentless, already number in the millions, and are increasing their ranks all the time.